Author of the acclaimed novel Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor leads us into a different kind of hell: paradise
Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor―an attractive married woman and mother―while Polo dreams about quitting his grueling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme.
Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society―with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies―and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.
"With a nimble command of the novel’s technical resources and an uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, the books navigate a reality riven by violence, race, class, and sex… In Melchor’s world, there’s no resisting the violence, much less hating it. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we’ve made."
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The New Yorker
"Fernanda Melchor explores violence and inequity in this brutal novel. She does it with dazzling technical prowess, a perfect pitch for orality, and a neurosurgeon’s precision for cruelty. Paradais is a short inexorable descent into Hell."
― Mariana Enriquez
"Paradais is beautiful and terrible."
― Marcus McGee, LARB
"Melchor’s prose is singular, with its fair share of page-long sentences that travel from the deepest psychic corners of her characters to the broadest panoramas of Mexican life."
― Leland Cheuk, National Public Radio
"Melchor’s brilliant, sinewy, streetwise second novel turns on a couple of young men in a Mexican town whose lusts take a violent turn...Melchor’s telling is psychologically revealing, finding ever deeper reservoirs of rage and dread in its characters."
― Mark Athitakis, The Los Angeles Times
"Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais is brutal poetry, distilled."
― Literary Hub
"Paradais warns against considering any luxurious abode as “safe” when the mere existence of such enclaves intensifies the inequalities that will eventually lead to their own demise. "
― CrimeReads
